Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Heather…
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to prayer. Oh, happy 2024! I know it’s already been a few weeks in, but it’s my first leading prayer in 2024.
I just wanted to share a few things that the Lord put on my heart. I don’t know if those of you watched online or attended Tuesday’s Prayer that Pastor Ken did. It was really great. And as he was praying, there was a few things that really stood out to me or grabbed my heart, like when somebody speaking and something feels highlighted to you or important, that’s the Lord kind of pressing on that for you.
Here are some things that leapt in my heart…
But Pastor Ken talked about going through new doors and new gates in 2024 and then he also talked about being cleansed from the past things so as not to defile the new season. And something in that just leapt in my heart. It was so good because there’s something about the end of a year, the beginning of the year… But I think a lot of us kind of like to take inventory or maybe some of you do New Year’s resolutions. I’ve kind of stopped doing that because I tend to let myself down. But I do try to hear from the Lord what He wants from me in this new year. And the thing that kept going off even as we were praying on Tuesday was that I think that there’s a lot of people that God wants us to walk through some new doors and some gates in 2024 into some new places.
We need to clean our hearts…
And I feel like a lot of us need to clean our hearts from some of that debris that kind of builds up after a year. And there’s something to that. I think letting God cleansing that, just taking intentionality and purpose to bring your heart before the Lord. And I like to do that a lot. Just bring it and just “examine my heart, Oh Lord.” Like what’s in there? Sometimes we don’t even know. And sometimes some of the things that are in there that are piling up is not even something that we intentionally did. It might be things that were done to us. It might’ve been places we walk through, heart things. It might’ve been other people, other influences around us. Sometimes that can feel like a heaviness inside of us as we’re kind of walking through this broken world that we live in. That can happen.
And the thing that the Lord always encourages me, because I am a little bit of a “feeler.” I walk through the world and at the end of the day you can kind of feel… like, say you’ve been walking around Walmart and you just start to feel that heaviness of what everybody else around you is walking through. Everybody’s a little different. But that’s the way that I am. And the Lord encouraged me in the fact that it’s just like walking through a day. At the end of the day, you’re going to be dirty just from walking through the day. Not because you did anything wrong necessarily, but you’re just walking a path… people are bumping into you. And just in the natural, you got to take a bath every day, right? You got to clean that crud out. You got to get cleaned up. I hope we do. We should! If you’re not, I’d encourage you to maybe talk to the Lord about that.
But you know, just cleaning… just in the natural, just cleaning ourselves from that day, from the dirt, from the environments that we’ve been in. If you walked outside in the summer barefoot, you’re going to have to wash your feet at the end of the day. You know, those kind of things.
Let’s do housecleaning…
And so I think there’s a lot of us that need to do some of that housekeeping in our heart from the previous year. And I just think of your dryer vent or your air filter. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s keeping all that debris from getting into the inner workings. And sometimes our heart is like that. It’s kind of like a filter. You’re supposed to guard your heart, right? So if we’re guarding it, there is a place where we’re maybe building some things up, like a filter that just need to be emptied, released so that flow can happen again.
We tend to let things sit…
Maybe I’m just speaking from personal experience. But because we do live in such a busy world where a lot of us are always moving, talking, going, doing, working, even in our quiet time sometimes, or our personal downtime, we might fill it with TV or social media or just things that it is hard to remember, to take that intentionality, to be quiet and to process things and to let the Lord get in there and clean out things. And so that was kind of what I had on my heart today.
He’s here to cleanse us and to free us…
I believe that He’s here to cleanse us and to free us from the things that have piled up in our minds, in our hearts, in our bodies. I mean, even sometimes we physically carry those things. If another person offended you or hurt you, you can carry that literally in your body. And sometimes that can manifest in like a sickness or an illness or a pain or an ache. And I think God made us so complex that our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our spirits, our souls, all that is intertwined. And so we can’t think that we’re just going to have something affect one little piece of our body or our mind or our heart and compartmentalize it. It’s going to affect all of us because that’s how He made us.
We’re a three-part being…
We are a spirit, we have a soul, and we live in a body. All of that works together. And as you know, we’re walking through this world in our body, things can happen in our soul that we have to process properly.
Philippians 3 in the Passion translation…
So all that to say, I wanted to start out by reading Philippians 3 in the Passion translation. Everyone knows it’s my favorite translation. I just like it because I do feel like it is a passionate, personal heart to heart speaking to God, and that is my favorite way to speak to Him.
“To truly know him meant letting go of everything from my past and throwing all my boasting on the garbage heap. It’s all like a pile of manure to me now, so that I may be enriched in the reality of knowing Jesus Christ and embrace him as Lord in all of his greatness. My passion is to be consumed with him and not cling to my own righteousness based in keeping the written law. My only righteousness will be his based on the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, the very righteousness that comes from God. And I continually long to know the wonders of Jesus and to experience the overflowing power of his resurrection working in me. I will be one with him in his sufferings and become like him and his death. Only then will I be able to experience complete oneness with him in his resurrection from the realm of death. I admit I haven’t yet acquired the absolute fullness that I’m pursuing. But I run with passion into his abundance so that I might reach the purpose for which Christ Jesus laid hold of me to make his own. I don’t depend on my own strength to accomplish this. However, I have one compelling focus. I forget all of the past as I fasten my heart to the future instead. I run straight for the divine invitation of reaching the heavenly goal and gaining the victory prize through the anointing of Jesus. So let all who are fully mature have the same passion. And if anyone is not yet gripped by these desires, God will reveal it to them and let us all advance together to reach this victory prize following one path with one passion. So not only are we forgetting those things of the past, that’s part of it good and bad.”
Breaking anything that’s holding us back…
Because sometimes we can be like, “Look at all my beautiful trophies, Lord, look what I did for you this year.” And how many know, that’s all in vain because He is going to call you to another thing. He’s going to call you to a new thing. And if we’re sitting and we’re just reveling in this moment that we had with Him last year, two years, five years, 10 years ago, He wants to bring us into new experiences with Him. But not only those things, forgetting the past, the good and the bad, but breaking anything that’s holding us back from our full pursuit of Him.
